


what makes a house grand

by x_vellichor



Category: Men's Hockey RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: Blow Jobs, Character Study, Established Relationship, M/M, Slice of Life, gratuitous use of connor mcdavid as a conduit for my feelings about jack eichel, i would call this pure toothrotting fluff but, jack and connor are capital s Soft, some angst-free mceichel for you, that’s basically the story y’all!!, there is a wee bit of smut, truly this is a love letter to small towns and connor and jack, written because connor and jack deserve to be unapologetically happy without complications
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-14
Updated: 2019-05-14
Packaged: 2020-03-02 13:55:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,518
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18812278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_vellichor/pseuds/x_vellichor
Summary: Jack and Connor buy a house, but they make it a home.





	what makes a house grand

**Author's Note:**

> (What makes a house grand, oh, it ain't the roof or the doors / If there's love in a house, it's a palace for sure.)  
> Title from "House Where Nobody Lives" by Tom Wait.
> 
> This is entirely fictional. So if you or someone you know is mentioned, please turn around. If not, please enjoy!

Jack and Connor buy a house in a small suburb. Connor thinks it’s a good sort of different, actually. 

There are certainly perks to living in a big city—the night life and the general air of excitement, the stores. The anonymity, that feeling of walking down the street and passing a thousand strangers, none of them knowing who you are.

(Well, they might know who he is, but they don’t know who he _is_. There’s a difference, there, in the unlimited potential it gives him to reinvent himself bit by bit every day and within each separate interaction, if he so chooses.)

But Connor finds there are perks to small town life, too.

For one, he likes falling asleep to the chirping of crickets and the susurrus of the wind threading through the trees instead of to the blaring horns and periodic police sirens characteristic of city traffic. He’s a fan of the big backyard, which has enough green space that he and Jack could build a playset and still have plenty of room left over for two or three little ones to run around freely. And so far, he isn’t minding the slower pace of life as much as he thought he would.

Beyond that, though, he realizes that he kind of likes the feeling of being _known—_ as a person, not a player. People don’t care about hockey at all in this town, and right now, that’s refreshing.

They’ve only been here a week, but when he walks down the street, people greet him by name; first name only, not first and last together. He can leave Connor McDavid behind and simply be Connor, here, and that counts for a lot. When he goes for milk at the convenience store on the corner, the manager claps him on the shoulder and asks after his “kind, funny husband” rather than asking for an autograph. 

(It’s really, really nice, actually.)

Anonymity is fun, but people seeing you—really seeing you—as an individual and accepting every part of you without question? It’s not an environment he’s ever had; it’s not something he’d ever thought he would _get_ to have, and it starts to soothe a fearful, festering place inside him that he’s been ignoring for a long time.

Connor thinks they can thrive here, maybe.

(Optimism hasn’t always worked out so well for him in the past, but…slowly, tentatively, he lets himself begin to hope.)

 

~~

 

Neither of them are the type to enjoy sitting around for too long. It’s probably a concomitant tendency of their former careers—that shared, lingering need to move and use their bodies—and the fact that they’ve been retired for the better part of two years, now. The novelty of having so much extra time has kind of worn off.

They’re still trying to find ways to fill all of it. It’s a more difficult task that they’d anticipated, actually. After giving so much of their lives to hockey, it’s not easy to step away and rediscover who they are without it, to explore hobbies and interests unrelated to the sport that had dominated almost all of their waking moments from pre-adolescence to adulthood.

So when Connor comes home from grocery shopping to see Jack helping their elderly neighbor paint her front door, it’s not a big surprise. He’s not sure Jack is the handyman type, exactly, but he likes to make himself useful in any way he can, and he loves helping people. He might have a reputation for liking to bitch at people on the ice, but he is unerringly kind outside of hockey circles, especially with kids and older people, even if he doesn’t admit to or advertise it.

His heart stops in his chest for a few beats and then returns in double time as he watches Jack laugh with her.

(The dark blue muscle tee certainly doesn’t help the speed of his pulse, either.)

He thinks Jack looks loose and friendly and comfortable, chatting with their neighbor. He looks like he belongs here, in this space.

Connor smiles fondly and brings the bags inside.

 

~~

 

Jack returns with a batch of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and a message.

“I’ve been given strict instructions to pass on a ‘hello’ to my ‘sweet, handsome husband’,” he grins, leaning into Connor’s side. “So hello, sweet, handsome husband.”

He has a few splotches of white paint on his face and down the front of his shirt, and he probably forgot to put on sunscreen again, because his cheeks are a little too rosy red, and he’s _su_ _ch_ a fucking dork; Connor can’t help it, he just has to kiss him, long and slow and deep.

“What was that for?” Jack asks, a little bit breathlessly, when they finally break apart. “Not that I’m complaining, because believe me, I’m not.”

He apparently gets extra freckles on the bridge of his nose when he gets too much sun, and Connor hasn’t ever really noticed them in this much detail before—it shocks him, how they’re still learning about each other, even now, but it excites him, too—and he’s struck with a sudden urge to kiss each individual one.

“Nothing in particular,” Connor says. He can feel himself smiling like an absolute idiot. “I’m just in love with you, is all.”

“Okay, Davo,” he says, and he scrunches up his nose and rolls his eyes, but he also kisses the top of Connor’s head when he passes by. That’s as good as an ‘I love you’ from Jack, who finds it far easier to show than to tell when it comes to demonstrating affection.

He follows Jack into the kitchen and asks, “You planning to share those cookies?”

“Better watch that tummy,” Jack chirps, poking Connor’s stomach. “You’re gonna get soft.” His eyes are tender and teasing, and this is how Connor fell in love with him in the first place—starting with getting roped into his loving, gentle ribbing, which is really just thinly veiled affection, and then through the subsequent realization that Jack is an absolute teddy bear, underneath the sass and the sarcasm.

“Jaaaaack,” he whines. “Please?”

“Maybe if you’re nice,” Jack mumbles through a mouth already stuffed with two cookies, and he waggles his eyebrows in a way that’s probably intended to be sexy but actually just looks dumb.

“Oh, if I’m nice, eh?” Connor arches an eyebrow and palms Jack through his jeans.

He groans, pressing instinctively into Connor’s hand, and crumbs tumble out of his mouth and onto the floor.

Connor laughs. “You’re cleaning that up.”

“It’s your fault!” Jack protests, but he grabs a dishrag from the sink to wipe up the floor. “That’s not being nice, it’s playing dirty.”

“I’ll show you dirty,” Connor says in an attempt at being seductive. It just makes Jack laugh.

 

But he isn’t laughing when Connor blows him right there in the kitchen, sucking and stroking until Jack comes down his throat with a shout.

He leans against the counter for a minute, looking dazed, and when he comes back to himself he slurs, “I think that was cookie worthy.”

“Yeah?”

“You can have two cookies, one for each knee that you probably fucked up doing that on the tile.”

“The real perks of retirement,” Connor nods sagely, and he grabs a cookie and bites into it. He’s half hard in his jeans, but he’s also hungry, and that kind of seems more important right now. The cookie is still warm and gooey—it’s delicious, they’re going to have to ask for this recipe—and Connor kind of moans on the next bite because that’s how _good_ it is.

When he looks up, Jack’s eyes are dark. “You want me to return the favor?” he asks, gesturing to Connor’s dick, and Connor is never going to say no to that because Jack’s mouth—

—is on him in ten seconds flat. He unzips Connor’s pants at record speed and takes him almost all the way down without preamble. He swears and clutches Jack’s curls, and he can already tell he’s not going to last long.

After just a couple minutes, he warns, “I’m gonna—” and promptly chokes on the words as Jack deepthroats his entire cock. That does it for him; he shoots down Jack’s throat with a loud, broken groan.

“Fuck, your mouth,” he manages, once he can speak again. “So good, Jack. Never gets old.”

“Yeah?” Jack smiles, smoothing back his hair. “That’s good, because you’re kind of stuck with me forever. Like, legally.”

Another wave of fondness hits Connor right in the chest like a lightning strike, overwhelming and all-consuming—the kind of fondness that you take and hold close to your chest and never let go; the kind of feeling that you build a forever on.

Yeah, Connor is pretty fucking in love with him.

(He looks out the window at the kid-sized backyard, at their newly christened kitchen, at Jack. _Yeah,_ he thinks again, but this time, it’s with a determined and settled confidence, a bone-deep certainty. _Yeah, we’re going to thrive, here._ )


End file.
